How do I count calories from home made food?

Use the recipe builder here on MFP. Add all the ingredients and how many servings it makes. It's a wonderful tool!

If it's aone off - I sort of do it manually, byt weighing every ingredient (especially the cooking oil), that's rather slow.

For things where I follow a recipe (rare) I use the recipe function online to input all the ingredients, then check - the fiddle here is working out how many portions, so I tend to make the recipe, measure the outcome, then divide by a nominal "approximate portion" and record hte size of the resulting portion in the title of hte recipe when I make hte listing, then when I eat it, I also weight the serving and when i log it i work out how many "recipy servings" or fractions of serving i ate and log that.
An example of that was my home-made bread - i weighed the final loaf, and set 10 servings and recorded in the title that a serving was 62g but when i ate a slice i weighed it and when it came in a 54g i logged 0.87 of a serving

For many of my meals - i don't follow a recipe - but i make frequently with similar ingredients (say a home-made tomato pasta sauce) but will often vary in weight of each ingredient, and will often contain whatever veg i happen to have in the fridge, I enter it once manually, then save it as a meal - next time i select the emal and change the quantities, for this i weight every ingredient as i cook and write them on the fridge with a whiteboard marker, then when I serve up, I know whether it made 2 portions with no leftovers or whether it made 2 portions plus 3 leftover portions, then I divide the weights for each ingredient by the total number of portions and use that in my log. It;s approximate - but better than nothing.

It's fiddly but worth it, good luck with your logging, and i look forward to seeing other people's tips too

Use the recipe builder here on MFP. Add all the ingredients and how many servings it makes. It's a wonderful tool!

^ This

I would weigh the individual ingredients, calculate their calorie value and try to be a little under in my consumption of other food that day to make up for any problems with the estimate. Actually, I always assume that I've underestimated a bit, partly because of the calorie labeling regulations, so I'm never upset if I'm a little under. This is not a precise process.

It takes a little time, but the recipe feature works really well.

When I have some free time I've been going in and adding recipes I'm planning to make soon, that way they'll be in there and ready to go when I want to make them. It's kind of nice to have all the nutrition info worked out ahead of time because then you can make modifications and see exactly what impact they're going to have, and tweak the recipe to fit your goals.

My real challenge is restaurant food. It's easy if you eat at chain places, because most things are in the database. But those aren't the kinds of places I tend to eat. I've actually been avoiding restaurants or deliberately choosing chain places just so I know what I'm getting- but I'm not happy with that long term. I've tried finding something in the database that seems to match closely, and I've tried recreating a restaurant recipe as best I can (adding in extra oil, butter, etc- because I used to be a cook and I know what's up!) But those meals are still kind of questionable for me. I've been trying to choose better foods when I'm out, and pay more attention to portion size (vs. just eating all of whatever's on my plate) so at least it's not just a calorie free for all!

i get caught up in the same problem. you can get really stressed over each and every calorie. sometimes i just search the mfp database and find a recipe that most closely represents what i made and use it. i know i'm close and i save time. same with eating out if i can't find exactly what i had. i just try to get as close as possible. the main thing is to stay in the habit of tracking and keep accountable!

That's why we get all these posts about 'why am I not losing weight' how do you know that you use the same amounts or ingredients from someone else's recipe? There is absolutely no point tracking if you aren't going to even attempt to be accurate doing it your way you may as well look at a meal and say that's 530 calories because that's just as accurate.

To the original poster just use the recipe builder it really doesn't take long and after a while you have a list of your most used recipes that you can call on.